


maps

by princessarcade



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Humor, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Healing, M/M, Multi, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-03-07 17:12:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessarcade/pseuds/princessarcade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>oh brooklyn, brooklyn, take me in / are you aware of the shape i'm in?</p>
<p>(Another post-Cap 2 fic.)</p>
<p>“You – you always did that, didn’t you? Always fought back and got into stupid bullshit because of your fucking steel-hard head,” he continues and the words, though spoken with nothing but annoyance, tear something open in you. Your chest expands, expands, expands.<br/>Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "just" - prologue

**Author's Note:**

> first stevebucky fic i've ever written please be gentle with me. thanks to tumblr users tonydouchestark and voodooling for their encouragement and appreciation they're awesome(r than me go forth and check them out)

                **I.**

                There were lines in your mother’s hands, even before the gold in her hair became scarce and shone among a waterfall of gray. You used to take her hands in yours each night and trace each ridge until your eyes burned and you realized she had finished reading her story. Sometimes, when your father’s footsteps still echoed and shook the whole of your shabby apartment, there would be red lines and violet bruises splattering her palms. Sometimes they would be stained with flour that would dust your forehead after she checked your temperature.  And well, she was always checking your temperature.

                There were always lines in your mother’s hands, even the night she left you. And then they were just lines and they were just hands and you were just.

                You were just a kid from Brooklyn.

**-**

                “You’re Sarah’s kid, right?” The man says, drawing out the word ‘right’. He looks like your father – and your father was neither stout nor Polish, but he has the same tenseness to his bony shoulders and eyes that hold the smallest hint of light. He looks like your father because he looks like he’s served and one day you will look like your father, too.

                “Yeah,” you answer, fumbling for your cash and staring through the window behind him. Bucky has his back turned toward you. But then he turns, and smiles through the window at you. He senses you with such ease that it will make you ache. Not today, though. You swallow and return your gaze to the old man.

                “She was nice.”

                You pay and leave, exhaling only when Bucky claps his hand on your shoulder. 

**-**

                Piano and art were the only things people knew you could do, before the serum. You weren’t very good at anything else, not even breathing. It’s a strange thought that dances in your mind ten nights before Bucky falls. You and Bucky are the last ones awake – which isn’t too different from when you were kids and your mother would walk into the kitchen to find you both passed out on the floor, with cookie crumbs spread around you like halos.

                “Steve,” Bucky says. His voice, though low, is anything but soft. He lost that months before you found him in Zola’s lab, and long before you will find him once more in the streets of Washington D.C. But of course he will have lost much more by then.

                “Yeah?” You lift your gaze from a bottle whose contents cannot fill you up with dizzying desire.

                “D’you remember that time your ma walked in on us at four in the morning and we were –?”

                “Embarrassingly drunk, yeah,” you say with a smile. “She was monumentally pissed.”

                “But we just kept laughing,” Bucky continues and his eyes close as he speaks, “We kept laughing and laughing and then she was laughing at something you said. God, what was it – anyways, you said something and it was just – I was crying by the end of it.”

                “Yeah, I remember,” you say quietly. Bucky doesn’t hear you.

                “You were always good at that.”

                “Good at what?” There’s something caught in your throat now.

                “Good at making us laugh. Good at making us _happy_ ,” Bucky says. He shifts in his seat and opens his eyes and looks at you. He smiles and it is full of such certainty that everything in your core tightens.

**-**

                Before the war takes Bucky and does not let go of him until decades later amidst flame and broken glass and broken bodies, you hold hands.  You think nothing of it, of how his fingertips kiss your skin or how his calloused palms are always warm. You think nothing of the scar that runs along his left knuckle from one of the many times he came running to your defense.

                You trace the lines on his hands, too. His hands are maps and you are their best navigator.

                Tonight, his hands are wrapped in thin red cloth you found in the village you are camping out in until morning. It seems like the cloth was once white. (Whether the red is Bucky’s blood or another’s, you cannot say – mostly because you don’t care.)

                “I’m fine,” Bucky says through his teeth. He is propped up against the headboard of the bed you will inevitably share. Brown hair matted against his forehead and eyes downcast, he looks wrecked and raw.

                “You’re not.” Your tongue slams against the roof of your mouth at the consonant ‘t’.

                “Well, I will be so stop looking at me like that,” he snaps.

                “I’m not looking at you right _now_.”

                “You’re looking at my hands like –” he breaks off, his breath furling into a wispy white cloud.

                “Like what, Buck?”

                “Like you looked at your ma’s.”

                You spend the rest of the night in silence, but Bucky lets you hold his hands without protest until your vision blurs, fading into darkness.

 

**-**

                Everybody knows you are not brothers. You could never be, with Bucky’s sharp and square jaw or his ‘too fucking round’ eyes or his lean muscles. Pre-serum or otherwise, you could never be mistaken as brothers. And yet nobody mistakes you for casual friends, either.  ‘Casual’ is not a word you can wrap around even the idea of Bucky. Bucky is a lot of things, but never just or casual. Bucky is courage and carnage.

                (They will take that when they see what you have seen all your life. They will take his courage and rip it to shreds until he is nothing but bared teeth and bloodied hands that no longer shake in fear.)

                You are not lovers, either. You have only tasted his mouth once, and he has tasted so many others since. You know each other’s bodies well, but you do not _know_ each other’s bodies. You wish you did – or you think you wish you did. These are not thoughts or desires that you need. Not when you are tearing across snow and mud to fight a war you will not know you won for years and years.

                Still, when you find your gaze locked with his and his lips sweep up into a familiar curve – a smile you have seared into your memory – and you notice that the frigid air has made his cheeks the colour of rose petals your mother used to keep pressed in her diary, your lungs expand into a galaxy of _somethings_ you hope for but don’t have.

                You don’t need to say it. Neither does he.

                And the first time you will want to, to really _say it_ and let the words cling to the air and the space around you, he will fall.

                You will follow. 


	2. "without"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first three chapters of this fic were written late spring 2014 and I'm only revisiting them now. Apologies for the wait and any inconsistencies!

II.  
In a way, you have done this before. You have woken up to a world without Sarah Rogers, and then without James Barnes. You have experience in living a world of without.

  
What you don’t expect is to wake up in a world of with.

  
You wake up to a world with flashing lights and pristine screens and aliens and experiments gone wrong and a man who doesn’t see how much of his mother courses through his veins. You wake up to an overabundance of food and poverty, to society still masking its misogyny and racism and cruelty, to brand new, on-demand everything. You wake up to the ongoing struggle for equality, to women so unlike Peggy but just as strong, to billionaire-playboy-philanthropists that make both your jaw clench and stomach ache from laughing really hard.

  
You wake up and for a while, you survive. You take the subway and walk along the streets of your youth – and you are still so, so young, you eat Chinese takeout and read what you have missed. You read the files of the ones you do miss. You stare at the phone and dare yourself to call her. (You don’t, not for some time.)

  
Then one day, you wake up and find yourself several hours later in the streets of the city you were born and raised in, beat-up and bruised and battling alongside strangers. It is the first fight you win and really feel that you have won since your emergence from the ice.

  
“Did anyone kiss me?” Tony Stark asks, and it is then you realize his eyes are not Howard’s at all, but Maria’s. Maria was made of softer everything, full of grace and poise and kindness. She reminded you of your own mother who although grew up in Chicago, Illinois and had thick blonde curls instead of brown, whose hands just kept making and remaking, possessed the same gentle strength. And Stark, who will never admit it, has that strength coursing through his veins.

  
“We won,” you say and though the words stick to the back of your throat, you mean them.

 

-

 

You don’t win the day they find you by the water – at least, not exactly. Of course, you don’t dismiss the fact that lives were saved that day. But you will never dismiss the lives that were lost. Or the one you have lost again, always.

  
Again, always, you wake up. And this time, it is to Sam’s wide grin and Natasha’s firm gaze when she asks you what happened.

  
“How?” you choke out, answering her question with another.

  
“They found you on the shore,” Nat says.  
“Where’s –”

  
“They haven’t found him.”

  
Silence envelopes you all, but when you ask the next question, you already know their answer.

  
Sam drives. He does not take you to him, but he does take you to a diner with ripped leather seats that is stuffed with the aroma of ‘really fucking good hamburgers’, according to Nat. At her prodding, you take two bites of Natasha’s cheese and onion burger which ends up tasting just as disgusting as it previously sounded. The diner is so crowded that your elbow nudges hers. It is warm and rigid – which is just like Natasha.

  
“Where do you think he’s gone now?” You lick your lips and turn toward her.

  
_Either to find or lose himself again._

  
“I don’t know. Somewhere important to both of us, maybe. Or where HYDRA kept him over the years.”

  
“That’s over thirteen different facilities,” Sam mutters after swallowing another eerily long fry.

  
“I know.”

  
“We’re going to all thirteen? I mean,” he pauses before taking a sip of his beer, “I don’t mind. I just gotta know.”

  
“No, not all of them.” You continue to fold the brown napkins that sit in front of you, folding them until they are nothing.

  
“Then where?”

  
“He’s destroyed twelve out of the thirteen since D.C.” You don’t need to pull out his file, but you do anyway, fishing it out of a blue tattered bag that you bought at the store across your old apartment. (Not your old apartment, but the one SHIELD was ‘generous enough to give to you’.)

  
Sam leans over and grabs one of the various files stamped with red.

  
“So, then the last one he’s going to is in –”

  
“New York.”

 

-

 

The blinding lights that dance in the night sky of the city no longer stab your eyes. You are no longer plagued by memories of aliens shooting out from the sky and a man wrapped in metal being swallowed into nothingness. And it’s not that you have forgotten – you could never forget the familiar clanging of battle and how your throat sealed itself up at the sight of Stark falling, falling, like everyone falls.

  
Like Bucky fell.

  
Like you fell.

  
“It should be in the basement of that building,” you say as you point toward a tall, grimy-looking apartment building. Natasha leans forward from the backseat and places her hand on your shoulder. Her grip is firm. Since New York – hell, since DC – she’s never treated you like glass and you know she never will. She doesn’t say ‘we’ll find him’. She just brushes her thumb against the fabric of your jacket.

  
“Let’s go, then,” Sam mutters as he parks.

  
The door to the basement, autumn orange with rust, is bent forward and ajar. You push down the thought of his name, as if even that will send him running again. Walking forward is about the best you can do.

  
“Steve?” Sam calls from the top of the stairs a few moments later.

  
“I’m fine,” you call back, your voice sounding funny and warbled as it thuds against the walls instead of bouncing off of them.

  
“Nat wants to know if you’re absolutely sure you want to go down alone.” You smile at this, but the gesture feels wrong on your lips.

  
“Yeah, I’m fine. If I’m not back in around five minutes, you’ll know –”

  
“That you did something stupid?” Nat interjects. Her voice is crisp and clear as always.

  
“That I did something stupid,” you repeat and step toward a dark hallway.

  
The lights are dusty and dim, flickering in tune with your footsteps. Breathing soldier-steady, you nudge one door open. Nothing should surprise you, since you’ve read the blueprint of this place over and over again. There are three rooms – the lab is the largest, followed by a room dedicated to an infinite amount of files, and the ‘ice room’. The ‘ice room’ hasn’t been used since the sixties, or at least that’s what the most recent file claims. It’s hand-written, German and stained with what appears to be or what you hope to be coffee.

  
‘ _A scientific gem hidden in the slums of America herself_ ,’ wrote a lab technician who you found out died five months ago. His letters glide across the margins despite the once-crimson ink having faded over the decades. ‘ _No laboratory has been built like this_.’

  
And it had all been for Bucky, or rather The Winter Soldier. His files stopped referring to him as anything but that moniker a year after you went under ice yourself. He did not have enough significance to earn him a name. Of course, names meant little to him the day on the bridge.

  
Before the bridge, nothing could be colder to you than ice. But then there were his eyes; blue like Bucky’s eyes had always been blue and not all at once. You both have blue eyes, but sometimes you forget because Bucky has eyes the colour of the ocean after a storm while you have eyes the colour of the summer sky. The ever poetic Jim Morita told you this once on one of The Good Nights. (These were the nights where Bucky and the others drank more than they wept or woke up screaming.) You remembered his words the moment you uttered ‘Bucky’ and the man wearing his face had turned. The Winter Soldier had Bucky’s eyes but didn’t: they were arctic and tragic. Tragic is the word that drowns your mind when you enter the laboratory. There are faded photographs of the ‘prized subjects’. They are mostly of Bucky: Bucky under ice, Bucky’s arm gleaming as it is ‘revised’ over and over again, Bucky’s eyes bottomless and wide like a child’s. There are also children and it sickens you how little shock this gives you. There’s a blonde girl whose face is dusted with freckles and blood, a pudgy-faced boy cradling a gun, and a girl with the thinnest arms and reddest hair you’ve ever seen – and there’s so many more. They are ghosts scattered on the damp concrete floor. Your fingertips press into the corner of another photograph of Bucky when there’s a dull thud trailed by darkness.


	3. "expand"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve finds Bucky, sort of. (Updating after a year or so. I feel somewhat distant from this fic and very, very critical of it. But I would feel more critical of it if I didn't post everything or, better yet, finish. So.)

**III.**

“Why are you following me?” the voice demands; it’s gotten jagged in the way voices do when they are unused for a long time. You are suddenly very aware of how heavy your eyelashes sit on your cheekbones and how your chest has tightened, constricting itself in a way it hasn’t since your last asthma attack.

 

“Bucky,” you exhale. It’s not a question. It could never be a question.

 

“Don’t call me that,” he snaps. “Don’t – don’t call me _anything_.”

 

Like always, your instinct is to protest but you swallow this down and it burns like acid.

 

“Okay,” you say instead. “But I won’t stop following you, Bu – I won’t stop following you.” Even in the dark, you can see him bristle. There’s a clatter and suddenly there’s cool, slick metal fingers curling around your neck.

 

“Why not,” he spits.

 

“It’s,” you cough out a bitter laugh, “it’s all I know how to do. I’m –”

 

“I’m not him.”

 

You’re both quiet for a while, his hand loosening around your neck.

 

_Tragic._

 

-

 

“How did you deal with Natasha and Sam?” you ask several hours later. He’s turned a lamp on now, but refuses to exit the shadows, opting instead for a seat on a counter a few feet into the darkness. You’re sitting on a chair, unchained and hands free of cuffs.

 

“I told them they could stay upstairs,” Bucky mutters. His voice is closer to normal now. It’s not smooth and liquid like it had been, but that had disappeared the day he left for war.

 

“You’re not staying long?”

 

“ _You’re_ not,” he corrects you. You lift one leg over the other, leaning forward to tie your shoelaces. You smile mirthlessly – sadly – when you hear his breath quicken at the movement.

 

“I’m not?”

 

“Shut up. Why do you have to be such a stubborn _ass_?”

 

“Okay,” you answer, mouth twitching.

 

“You – you always did that, didn’t you? Always fought back and got into stupid bullshit because of your fucking steel-hard head,” he continues and the words, though spoken with nothing but annoyance, tear something open in you. Your chest expands, expands, expands.

 

_Bucky._

 

-

 

“I went to the exhibit,” he tells you after pushing a bowl of cold fried rice toward your feet. ‘I know,’ you want to tell him. You just pick the bowl up and take the fork out of the rice and begin to eat. “I went to the exhibit and I saw m – him.”

 

“I’m sorry,” you murmur and you hate yourself for saying it. The apology is nothing.

 

“I’m not him, Steve. He wouldn’t have – fuck, you wouldn’t have done any of what I did,” he says. “He wouldn’t have. I’m – I’m not him.”

 

“You _are_.”

 

“I’m not!” he shouts, and the words bounce off the walls. “You saw the pictures – I’m a fucking animal, I’m –”

 

“You are not an animal, Bucky,” you cut in, “you’re – they hurt you. They forced you to do what you didn’t want to do. What you would never want to do.”

 

He’s silent for three seconds before laughing.

 

“Steve, I would have done it. They took my memories, but they didn’t have to do much about the rage.”

 

“What do you –”

 

“I would have done it, Steve.”

 

“No, you wouldn’t.” You’re shaking your head, setting the stupid rice down. “Bucky, you wouldn’t have –”

 

“I would have done it if it meant fucking protecting you. I would have done it for you.” Each syllable pierces you not in the heart, but in the lungs. Your breath is caught, snagged on the words ‘ _for you_ ’.

 

“Oh.”

 

He steps forward, metal arm tinted green in the light.

 

“You were always so good.”

 

“You are, too,” you say, voice soft.

 

“You were always so idiotic, too.”

 

Your laughter is too faint for it to echo throughout the room.

 

“That’s why I needed you.” You grin at him, but he avoids your gaze.

 

“ _You stopped needing me, though_ ,” he doesn’t say. But you can hear it, and the sound of it is deafening. His fingers – the ones they didn’t take – tighten around the arm they gave him. You blink, and remember. Remember how his fist crashed into your cheek but how, for once, you did not feel fragile.

 

“I’m never going to be him.”

 

“I’m never going to be him, either,” you answer and it is stupid of you to say. (But you say it anyways because he needs to hear it.)

 

“Okay.”

 

 _Okay_.

-

He tells you that it’s over. He has killed them all: each who oversaw The Winter Soldier’s birth and rebirths – each who had a hand in Bucky’s destruction.

 

“I went to Rome,” he says. “They had me kill a – she was young.” He bites each word out. The letters sound funny in his mouth. “So I went back a week ago.”

 

“You killed them.” This is a fact, so you state it as such.

 

“I did.”

 

He tells you that whenever he was pulled back out from the ice, it was like rising to the surface from the bottom of the ocean. He tells you that he remembered you just vaguely. You were a dream. A wish. You weren’t real.

 

“I dreamed of you too,” you say. And you did dream of him. You dreamed of the summers you spent lazing around on kitchen floors, of the nights that felt so long and so secret, of Bucky’s laugh which you thought you had forgotten.

 

You don’t tell him about the nightmares because you know he must have his own. Instead, you swallow them down into nothingness like you have been training yourself to do since resurfacing yourself. You tell him that – that yes, of course, yes – it was like rising from an abyss.

 

He tells you that it’s over, but you both know that it’s not.  


-

 

“Come with me,” you say and your voice is coarse. “Bruce – he’s – he can help.” Bucky stares at you, a familiar crease in his brow appearing. It’s not a lie; Bruce is ‘not that kind of a doctor’ but he’s the closest thing you’ve got next to Sam. “Sam,” you add. “He can help, too. Really.”

 

“Steve,” Bucky sighs.

 

“He can help,” you repeat dumbly. “They both can – and I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there.”

 

“You’re – you can’t do that.”

 

“Of course I can,” you retort vehemently.

 

“We’ll see.”


	4. "okay"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things go from sort of okay to sort of not then back to sort of okay?

**IV.**

It takes three days, four more boxes of bland fried rice, and a cold pizza Sam brings down to the dingy basement, but at precisely seven in the morning two weeks before Christmas, he comes up the stairs with you.

 

The car ride to the Tower is – interesting. Bucky says little, but Sam manages to draw out responses here and there. Actually, you’re fairly certain Bucky even smiled at Sam for a brief one and a half seconds at the mention of [insert something here]. He sits next to you, his eyes practically burning above the back of Nat’s head, who is sitting in shotgun. (You ignore the way her fingers linger on Sam’s arm).

 

“We’re here,” you start to say but your voice catches in your throat when you meet Bucky’s gaze. His metal arm is pressed up against yours, and for once the cold is comforting. “Bucky?”

 

He doesn’t answer, his eyes darting from the glimpse of the Tower you can get from inside the car and your face.

 

“Bucky, you’re – you’ll be fine,” you promise quietly.

 

He doesn’t look back up from underneath his baseball cap, but you watch his mouth twitch into a hint of a smile.

 

“Okay.”

 

-

 

“You could have mentioned it in a  _ text _ , and I would be all for this,” Tony is saying. He’s raking his hands through his hair as he paces around the lounge. (Was his hair streaked with this much gray the last time you saw him?) “Like, ‘Hey Tony, my man, my very best man, O man of iron’ – wait, that’s more like Thor – your texts are more ‘Hey Tony, I’m bringing my homicidal very not-dead best friend from the past over for a few weeks, is that alright with you?’ And I would have been like, ‘Okay, let me get emotionally and mentally prepared for this’ to which you would have answered with ‘Don’t take too long, we’re at the lobby.’”

 

“Would that really have been an improvement?” you ask when he pauses to take a breath. You smile instead of smirk (though the latter is sorely tempting) at the groan that follows.

 

“Apparently your texts are more like – nonexistent,” he rattles on. “And it would have been. Truly.” He presses his lips together and collapses backwards into one of the sofas. “But you’re all here already, so I guess …”

 

“You guess …?”

 

“He’s got the room just down the hall from yours,” Tony says, and you grin at how he tries to sound exasperated. Slowly, you stand and squeeze his shoulder.

 

“Thanks, Tony. It means a –”

 

“Yeah, yeah.” He swats at your hand, but you can see the smile in his eyes. (The real one – not the one he offers to the press or the one he offered you when you first met.) “Go get your icy bestie settled in and all.”

 

“Ha. Will do.” You start down the hall toward the kitchen when Tony calls out after you again.

 

“Steve?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I’m not a fucking adoption agency, so don’t think I’m housing that birdbrain of yours.”

 

“That’s a shame,” you reply as you grab one of Thor’s chocolate bars out of their plastic container, “I’m pretty sure he and Clint bonded pretty well.”

 

Silence.

 

“One day, I’m an asshole billionaire with serious relationship issues, the next I’m fucking Mr. Turn-A-New-Leaf Scrooge with a dysfunctional family living on my property.”

 

“We love you for it, Tony.”

 

“Just go already, Cap.”

 

“God bless us, each and every –”

 

“Fuck you, just go!”

 

When you get to Bucky a minute or so after, you’re still stifling your laughter. 

 

-

 

So, there are five distinct Bad Bucky Moments. Tony claims that there are six, but you don’t think Bucky scarfing down Tony’s unclaimed pizza slice is a Bad Moment. It’s more of a sign that Bucky is healing, really. Not that you say this to Tony, who is not and probably will never be over it.

 

The first time, it happens like this: everybody is in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, just talking and then someone says something and suddenly all hell breaks loose. Bucky’s beating the shit – or trying to – out of Thor, and you have to physically pry him off promptly before he slumps back and starts to cry.

 

As a child, Bucky hardly cried in front of you much less a room full of people. Even with the Howling Commandos, though Bucky’s eyes misted over every few nights, he never let his tears fall. Whenever he did, the next day he would pretend it never happened and you would pretend along with him.

 

He stops pretending after the second time when he nearly chokes Clint to unconsciousness in the rec room. (You stop pretending after the first.)

 

The fifth is the worst and it’s mainly because of the aftermath.

 

He leaves.

 

-

 

“What. Happened.” Your throat feels like it’s been scraped up by sandpaper and rough stone. Tony presses his lips together and lowers his gaze.

 

You’re not angry at Tony. Tony regularly provokes you, is a constant source of indignation but it’s never for too long and for reasons like his lack of self-esteem and inability to remember to eat or drink for several days.  With Tony, you’re never infuriated.

 

But Bucky has left and Tony could have stopped him. He didn’t.

 

“He said he needed to figure shit out,” Tony says, still concentrating on avoiding your gaze. You watch him and feel some kind of familiarity rise in you. You’ve done this before: you fold your arms into yourself and hunch your shoulders. You don’t look at anybody who speaks to you and your voice shrinks into white noise.

 

You make yourself small.

 

_ Tony is making himself small _ .

 

“Okay.” Swallowing, you force yourself to relax your shoulders still watching him.

 

“He’ll come back,” Tony adds quickly with a watered down version of his smile. You nod.

 

“He doesn’t want me to follow him, does he?” You don’t mean to sound bitter.

 

Tony doesn’t answer. He shifts on his feet before turning to face his desk.

 

“I’m sorry for yelling.”

 

His shoulder blades soften subtly.

 

“No need to apologize, Cap.”

 

-

 

Natasha takes you out on Tuesdays. You don’t remember when this started but you vaguely recall waking up a few months before D.C happened (you always refer to Bucky’s return as ‘D.C’ now) to find the redhead lounging in the tattered armchair SHIELD generously supplied you with sipping tea from a bright green mug.

 

It went sort of like this:

 

_ Steve enters the cramped living room and freezes _ .

 

Natasha: Stop staring and get dressed.

 

Steve: What the hell?

 

Natasha: Get dressed.

 

Steve: What is going on –

 

Natasha: Do you have plans for today? How do you feel about manta rays?

 

Steve: Uh.

 

_ Natasha stares at him blankly _ .

 

Steve: No and … they’re … fine?

 

Natasha: We’re going to the aquarium.

 

Steve: Okay.

 

(You figure that this was the moment Natasha decided it was her mission in life to find you a date.)

 

So yeah, Tuesdays are sacred in that you spend them with Natasha Romanoff doing things like buying Filipino desserts on a whim or having ice cream at Central Park in early December. It’s always fun and gets your mind off of things like your latest mission or the way you ache at the sight of Peggy and the glaring absence of the Howling Commandos.

 

On the Tuesday following Bucky’s departure, Natasha does not take you anywhere – for which you are immensely grateful for. Nothing could distract you from the thought of him at this point, and everyone in the Tower has long since realized this. So, she doesn’t take you out bowling like you had originally planned.

 

Instead, when you walk into the kitchen at ten that morning (which is pretty late for you), she thrusts an apron into your hands and wordlessly jabs a finger at the recipe book propped up on the counter.

 

“We’re making cinnamon rolls,” she tells you after a minute of you staring at her back.

 

You consider refusing.

 

“Okay,” you say.

 

You mess the first batch up. Like, you really fuck it up and for a moment you think Nat’s going to kill you with her spatula. But five or so hours later, as you wait for the new-and-improved rolls to finish baking, you take a seat next to her at the table.

 

“Tony’s not keeping all tabs on him,” you say quietly. Nat nods the way she always does – without the slightest hint of shock. She expects everything, or at least wants everybody to think so.

 

“He’ll appreciate that, I’m sure,” she answers and it’s not in the condescending trying-to-understand-but-failing-epically tone another person would say it. Natasha had also lost herself long ago, and though she’s risen up from it you figure it will always stick to her – both the loss and raw anger.

 

“Yeah.”

 

The oven goes off then and you get up before she does, not wanting her to see the way your jaw has locked but knowing that she sees anyway.

 

-

 

On the third Friday after Bucky leaves, Clint whips a Wii nunchuk at your head and you lurch forward and curse at him.

 

“Fuck, Clint, what the hell?” you exclaim, looking up as he smirks and folds his arms neatly across his chest.

 

“You’ve gone too long without  _ Mario Kart _ ,” he says and you scowl at him.

 

“You could have asked.”

 

“I could have,” Clint confirms, grinning widely with his crooked teeth, “but you’ve gone too long without swearing, too.”  

 

You stare at him. Then you pick up the controller next to you.

 

“You’re going to lose,” you state calmly.

 

“ _ Awesome _ ,” Clint says and not a syllable of the word is sarcastic.

 

-

 

“My mother taught me piano too,” Tony tells you as he slides into the space next to you on the piano bench. Your fingers halt their dance as he begins to play Clair de Lune. “Dad hated it.”

 

You’re ten days away from Christmas and three months into the Disappearance of Bucky: The Sequel. It’s gotten better, but not significantly so. After the first month, you started going out with Natasha again – actually, after a few weeks, Pepper comes along too. Nearly two months in, you and Sam start jogging again. Two and a half months is marked by binge-watching  _ Orphan Black _ and  _ Merlin _ with Bruce and Thor. Now, you’ve taken to hanging around Tony in the music room you discovered the sixth week of sulking on top of spending nearly every afternoon in his workshop again.

 

“If I was sick but not sick enough to be stuck in bed,” you say to Tony as he starts playing another piece you don’t recognize, “Ma and I would just sit at the piano and make up random songs.” Tony doesn’t turn to you, but you watch his mouth twitch at the corners. He leans over as his fingers dance up an octave.

 

“What kind of songs?”

 

“I don’t know.” You rake a hand through your hair which you now agree with Sam needs a desperate trim. “Mostly upbeat tunes, I guess.” Tony actually laughs at that. You grimace at him.

 

“ _ Tunes _ ,” he says under his breath.

 

“Shut up.”

 

“Let’s do this then.” You lift your gaze to meet his, questioning. “Let’s … make one up?”

 

“Oh,” you say and your hands hover over the keys for two more seconds before you start. 


End file.
